As the 50th (and my 9th) Ludum Dare is coming to the end, I'd like to summarize my experience. It's not gonna be a whole essay, just some thoughts.

1. Coming up with an idea.

I created a mindmap with every interpretation of the theme I could think of and then I accumulated the ideas into three aggregates I liked the most. Then I settled for the extincion of dinosaurs, since both the asteroid and extinction are cool interpretations of the theme in my mind. Besides dinosaurs are cool.

2. The gameplay.

I think the game is fun. I think the game is polished. I spent a lot of time adding barely noticeable things like tips or a tiny chance to get bonus resources and the celebration of this fact by making a bigger popup text. Was it worth it? Maybe, I don't regret it, even though I needed a third day for art, music, balance and some other extra stuff. It's a better game because of the extra time, so it's all good.

The balance was nice, which is a miracle, since it didn't exist until the third day. I've made multiple too difficult games before, but now the annoying clicking was the source of the players' frustration more than the difficulty. I quickly fixed it in the post-jam version, which was a good decision as some players clearly checked it out according to my itch.io statistics.

3. The art.

I decided to draw some things on paper, since my analog drawings look better than the digital ones. Then I drew over them in Gimp in pixel-art style. This resulted in probably my nicest-looking game of all my LD entries. I even used the hand-drawn art in my menu and win-screen, which turned out nicely, although admittedly it was due to the lack of time.

The whole process took place on the third day, before that I briefly considered keeping the placeholder art, which actually had some nice qualities, as @notempty kindly noticed. But I still think I upgraded it a lot.

4. What I've learned.

• How to work with Godot (and it turned out to be a delightful experience).
• One mistake can overshadow the rest of the game.
• Energetic drinks work well on me.
• Being ambitious maybe is a bad idea, but it's a lot of fun.
• Using mind-maps and task managing tools is helpful.
• Having a third day for polish is nice.

5. Thanks to all of the people who played my game! :)

Especially those who commented and the streamers (namely @moe9times and @aarimous).

If you want to check out Dino Village: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/dino-village